CINCINNATI — An Ohio clothing designer is making a name for herself not just for cutting-edge designs but for being willing to share them for “free.” Caitlin McCall, a graduate of the University of Cincinnati’s design program, recently made a big splash at Omaha’s Fashion Week.
What You Need To Know
- Designer Caitlin McCall's new collection is called MILOM: Maybe I'll Live On Mars
- McCall was inspired by NASA's images of Mars taken by a rover in 2017
- McCall's collection was selected for this year's Omaha Fashion Week
- McCall plans to make all the patterns in her collection free to the public as open-source files
It’s not a stretch to say McCall’s fashions are out of this world. She calls her collection, MILOM.
“It stands for Maybe I’ll Live on Mars,” McCall said. She’s been fascinated by Mars for years.
“This concept actually started percolating in my brain way back in 2017,“ McCall said. “I was in grad school (North Carolina State) at the time, and this is when the Mars rover was starting to send back pictures from the surface of Mars. It was generating a lot of buzz.”
Her view of exploring the Red Planet is not done through rose-colored glasses. She’s taking a more practical approach.
“Part of the exploration to get to Mars is if we don't have a life here on Earth and where that's coming about is, you know, this destruction and overconsumption of our planet,” McCall said. “It's a very human thing. And so there's this question on colonizing Mars and building a community there is: are we looking at the right issues?
She’s sounding the alarm, like Cassandra from Greek Mythology, who inspired one of her most popular creations on the runway, a red jumpsuit with brightly colored embroidered skulls on the back.
“To be a Cassandra is to be like something of a whistleblower,” she said. “You're giving a dire warning, and usually it's a type of situation where people aren't ready to listen to that warning.”
The jumpsuit is getting good reviews, including from Bella, a model from Kettering who modeled some of the collection for a photoshoot in Cincinnati. Bella’s also an amateur astronomer,
“I think that it's really cool, sort of a military astronaut vibe,” she said.
“My family and I like to go see eclipses and different things in the sky we like to look at. We're definitely out there looking at Mars.”
The piece incorporates some space-age technology with machine embroidery from Two Fish Apparel in Cincinnati, where McCall works when she’s not designing her latest collection.
"Just half of the design took a little over three hours to run on the machines at work,” McCall said.
“If I were to do this by hand, this and working nonstop like 8 hours a day, it would probably take a month or two.”
She did spent months designing and crafting the collection, revealed in less than five minutes on the runway in Omaha, as part of the city’s fashion week, considered one of the biggest and most prestigious in the U.S.
“The scale is always so different when it’s on the runway,” McCall said. “it's always so fast. It's always fleeting and it's always just a really amazing high adrenaline feeling.”
McCall was selected by judges to show her collection in a show known for being much more approachable and affordable for emerging designers than venues in New York or Paris.
“That's a very different story from New York Fashion Week or that whole circuit, but it's thousands and thousands of dollars to participate as a designer,” McCall said. “It's a really good opportunity. It lowers the barrier for a lot of people.”
That’s inspiring her to share the show’s garments with fans who sew — by making everything available online — for free.
“Making patterns open source allows people who are wanting to get into fashion and get into sewing, to have a free resource, and it again lowers the barrier and makes materials more available,” she said.
Couture Fashion patterns can cost hundreds of dollars so getting to use McCall’s work for free can help some others blast off to Mars, without spending a lot of money along the way.